John Diffley

Biography

John Diffley was born and raised in New York. He obtained his PhD from New York University in 1985, and was a postdoctoral fellow with Bruce Stillman at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory until 1990. He then started his own research group at the Clare Hall Laboratories, originally the Imperial Cancer Research Fund and then Cancer Research UK (and now part of the Francis Crick Institute).

Research Interest

  aintaining the integrity of the genome requires the precise duplication of all of the cell's chromosomes in each cell cycle. Errors in this process can cause the mutations leading a cell down the path to cancer. DNA replication in eukaryotic cells initiates from a large number of chromosomal sites known as origins. These initiation events do not occur synchronously but, rather, occur throughout the S phase in a cell cycle in a reasonably precise pattern. The six subunit Origin Recognition Complex (ORC) binds to an essential sequence element within yeast origins and remains bound at origins throughout the cell cycle. ORC, together with Cdc6 and Cdt1, loads the MCM replicative helicase as a double hexamer around double stranded DNA at yeast origins. This occurs in vivoduring G1 phase and remains until origin firing during S phase.